Deeplinks Blog posts about EFF Europe

As part of an emerging international trend to try to ‘civilize the Internet’, one of the world’s worst Internet law treaties--the highly controversial Council of Europe (CoE) Convention on Cybercrime--is back on the agenda. Canada and Australia are using the Treaty to introduce new invasive, online surveillance laws, many of which go far beyond the Convention’s intended levels of intrusiveness. Negotiated over a decade ago, only 31 of its 47 signatories have ratified it.

In June, we published an article highlighting the problems with uploading sensitive documents to two Wikileaks imitators, the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU) and the Wall Street Journal'sSafehouse. Apart from the well-documented security problems of both sites, we noted that their terms of use (TOU) offered whistleblowers very little protection.

On August 8, AJTU published its revised TOU, attempting to address our concerns. We've looked through the new terms and we're happy to report some good changes.

Yesterday we reported that EFF and the other civil society members of the Civil Society Information Society Advisory Committee to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (CSISAC) had declined to endorse a draft Communique on Internet policy-making principles produced by the OECD. Since then, the OECD and key government representatives reopened negotiations with civil society, business and the technical industry stakeholders, in an effort to find mutually acceptable text to accommodate our concerns. Unfortunately that was not successful, and EFF and other members of the OECD's Civil Society Information Society Advisory Council have declined to endorse the full and final version of the Communiqué released on 29 June.

The success of Wikileaks in obtaining and releasing information has inspired mainstream media outlets to develop proprietary copycat sites. Al-Jazeera got into the act first, launching the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU), an initiative meant to "allow Al-Jazeera's supporters to shine light on notable and noteworthy government and corporate activities which might otherwise go unreported." AJTU assures users that "files will be uploaded and stored on our secure servers" and that materials "are encrypted while they are transmitted to us, and they remain encrypted on our servers."

On June 3, EFF will begin live coverage of a critical discussion about online freedom of expression held by the 47 member states of the U.N Human Rights Council during its seventeenth session in Geneva. The meeting will include the introduction of a landmark report to the Council by United Nations Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue that advocates safeguards to protect free expression online including privacy and anonymity.